An anonymous reader writes in:
I am now in the the tenure process and one question that naturally arises is the value of certain kinds of publications. Since co-authored publications become more and more common in philosophy, the question arises how they count, esp. in the tenure procedure. There was some discussion about this topic on Brian Leiter's Blog in 2013 (https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2013/02/co-authorship-in-philosophy.html). One commentator argues that co-authored papers should not count that much towards tenure because they do not demonstrate that the candidate has the potential to publish in the future. This argument rests, however, on the contingent fact that most philosophical papers are single authored. If more philosophers publish co-authored papers, the ability to contribute to such papers becomes an important aspect of successful publishing. I would thus see co-authorship is an additional skill that will become more and more important in our scholarly context. Hence, I would not value co-authored papers against single-authored papers, but see them as their "own beasts". I am curious what colleagues think about this issue
This is a good query. Although we've discussed co-authorship on at least a few occasions, I'm always happy to return to the issue because I think it's an important one. Judging from past discussions here and elsewhere, there seems to be something of a prejudice against co-authorship in philosophy, though this may be changing. In any case, having just read the Leiter thread anonymous links to in their query, I think the following comment by Mark van Roojen is probably fairly accurate:
Tenure is a global judgement, not about a person's past work, but about how they'll continue to contribute. Coauthoring a good paper where there are other single author papers of similar quality is more evidence that one will continue to contribute over time, perhaps even in a different collaborative way from the way the single author papers display. Writing *only* coauthored papers is something that less clearly presents evidence of continued contribution. The mixture seems to me greater than the sum of its parts in this context.
I'm not sure I agree with van Roojen's suggestion that only publishing co-authored papers presents less evidence of continued contribution. Most non-humanities fields are dominated by co-authored papers (so much so that single authored papers are rare), and nobody in those fields takes publishing only co-authored papers as less evidence of continued contribution. Why should it? If one is consistently publishing good co-authored work, that's evidence that one will continue to do it! Otherwise, though, van Roojen's comment is apt and supports the following advice: in terms of seeking tenure, if one publishes co-authored work, then (in philosophy at least) it is wise to have a fair mixture of co-authored work and single-authored work. Provided one has at least some single-authored work (in good venues, or otherwise having significant impact), then my sense is that co-authored work will probably be helpful toward tenure.
Finally, following a remark by Charles Pigden at thread anonymous linked to, I think it is probably a good idea to make it clear in one's tenure materials what one's contributions to co-authored work were. Did you come up with the basic argument for the paper, and simply get help on some of the technical details from co-author(s)? Or did someone else come up with the paper's main idea/argument, and you filled out some of the technical details? Or, did you only write one section of the paper (say, the objections and replies section, or in an X-Phi piece the methods section)? These are the kinds of things that tenure-committees seems likely to find relevant, and (I think) rightly so. Of course, it is always possible for a tenure candidate to lie or otherwise fudge their contributions. However, a tenure-candidate could document their contributions by, perhaps, getting letters of outside support from a couple of co-authors, perhaps.
But these are just my thoughts. What are yours, particularly those of you who have served on tenure committees that have dealt with these kinds of questions?
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